Anti smoking laws protect the people who do not choose to smoke from exposure to the carcinogen. I do not support legislating anything as a crime if there is no victim. Here the victims tend to be waiters and bartenders moreso than other patrons (due to amount of exposure).
Anti-Transfat laws protect the people from a cheap manufactured butter/oil replacement that has deadly build ups. Woohoo, junk food is cheap with transfats. You can’t make frosting in a can without partially hydrogenating something. The victims here are the general population who ingest this stuff because its cheap and tastes good. For just a few pennies more, there are far less deadly substitutes (with the exception of preservable frosting in a can - otherwise people would have to add water and a couple drops of veggie oil and whip it themselves.)
How does LA make fast food illegal? How do they define “Fast food”. Sure McDonalds and Taco Bell are fast food, but what about Applebees? If the restaurant doesn’t make anything you couldnt whip up in your own kitchen, why is it illegal?
First, our schools should teach nutrition from first grade on.
In some poorer areas, there isn’t anywhere to purchase nutritious food. Especially fresh fruits and veggies. People without transportation shop at the Dollar Store and have ramen and canned meat night after night.
You wouldn’t have to ban things if there were good, healthy options available and affordable.
Trans fat ban is equivalent to the government saying food manufacturers can’t put nasty chemicals in food. Its a ‘ban’, sure, but its like banning some nasty chemical from being used as a food additive(apologies, i can’t think of any offhand, but no doubt there have been plenty of food preservatives and the like banned from use). All in all, a good thing, unless you want to hearken back to the days companies could put anything they damn well pleased into food and sell it. You, as a private party, can probably still buy trans fats and cook them up though, if its that important to you.
Smoking ban is banning you from harming other people. Well, not harming… annoying. It takes years of constant exposure to lead to any real lasting effects. The problem coulda been solved by making a smoking license, and then requiring adequate ventilation, which would be trivially easy to set up(though not cheap), same as any other area that has bad fumes.
By the way, they just banned smoking, not tobacco. You can still use smokeless tobacco most everywhere, public and private. I do all the time.
True, but greater health for more people seems like a fair trade off if you simply can’t eat any more trans fats. If its a given that health care is a good thing, and public health care even better, then I would rather have something that’s good and deal with the consequences than eliminate everything that may impinge on your freedom to eat trans fats. If health care leads to other people taking a greater interest in what you eat, then that’s the breaks.
As I understand it, the law puts a limit on the number of fast food places in an area, and restricts new ones from being built. I don’t know how they define fast food though, but you cannot open a McDonalds in certain places now.
It’s a very progressive tax - it theoretically hurts poor people the least since it’s not only a ‘luxury’ but a potentially harmful one. But this is more of a ‘make taxes more palatable’ thing than a ‘make sinning less attractive’ thing.
If the tax were directly tied to statistics related to it’s harm and cost to society, and the money were channeled directly into some kind of UHC system, that would have obvious benefits.